The present invention relates to an apparatus and a method for automatically feeding tubular articles, particularly hosiery, to a sewing machine adapted to close the tubular articles at one of their axial ends.
It is known that the toe of hosiery articles is generally still open when said articles are unloaded from the machine that forms them, and that said hosiery articles must be subjected to subsequent darning or looping of the toe in order to form the finished product.
The darning or looping significantly affects the overall production costs of the hosiery articles, mainly owing to the fact that it requires manual loading of the hosiery articles onto the darning or looping machine.
In order to reduce the production costs, machines which can produce hosiery with the toe already closed have been designed in recent years. However, these machines are more expensive than conventional machines and their production cycle is inevitably longer than that of conventional machines. For these reasons, the advantages achieved with these machines, in terms of hosiery production costs, are not relevant.
Devices have also been provided for mechanically transferring the hosiery article, at the end of the production cycle, from the machine that produces it to a sewing or looping head, by removing from the machine, one loop at a time, the last row of knitting formed, which constitutes the toe of the hosiery article to be closed. These devices allow to achieve very precise sewing or looping of the toe, but they too have the problem of slowing the production of the hosiery knitting machine.